221 - The Piano Sounds Awful
I’ve had a Yamaha U7 piano for over 40 years. Bought it new. The U7 is about as good as upright pianos get.
My friends know I’m hard of hearing and wear hearing aids. It’s more than just normal hearing loss. Without going into details I require expensive, more fully featured than usual hearing aids. My hearing loss is so unbalanced the aids literally have different sized speakers (called “receivers”) for each ear.
One of the features virtually all hearing aids have is feedback cancellation - it’s necessary if you don’t want them squealing all the time. Most of your standard ones use rapid very narrow band pitch oscillations - think an LFO on a synthesizer - to accomplish this. When listening to normal day to day sounds this works fine, however, if your primary field is music and your instruments of choice happen to feature multiple strings for each note, and in my case these are piano and mandolin, both of which have this characteristic, then this form of feedback cancellation is terrible - it makes the instruments sound as if the unisons are out of tune even though they aren’t. Imagine picking up your mandolin and no matter what you do it still sounds out of tune! And your piano sounds like it’s not been tuned for years. Obviously this sucks.
So my hearing aids have a different kind of feedback cancellation - I couldn’t describe how it’s done other than to say it makes them more expensive, as does the other features such as multi-band EQ, various levels of compression and background noise elimination.
They’re about as good as can be expected, but they still don’t make the world sound normal, aka, the way it sounded pre hearing loss. I still struggle to hear conversations, and the latest kick is now my piano sounds awful.
I’ve been working with various settings on these hearing aids trying to get it to be a pleasant experience sitting down at my piano, but the sad fact is, it just sounds harsh and, for lack of a better term, “brittle” when I play it.
The good news is, when I use the pianos at work (I work part time as a piano accompanist) they sound fine - same goes for sampled pianos I load into my DAW, so what’s the problem?
40 years of heavy playing has worn deep grooves into the ends of the felt hammers. Where, when the piano was new only 1/8” of hammer hit the strings, now 1/2” hits them, and this after going deep into the grooves on the ends of the hammers. And, when the hammer finally hits the strings, the felt that makes contact is compressed / hardened. This causes a brightness as the harder than necessary hammers enhance upper partials / overtones on the strings.
For most people this would just make the piano tone sound somewhat harsh and unpleasant, but with hearing aids like mine, these boosted harmonics literally push them past their capacity to amplify these high notes without causing digital distortion, and that’s what I’ve been hearing.
The good news is the problems I’m having aren’t caused by hearing loss, at least not directly anyway.
The bad news fixing this by voicing the hammers is expensive, and if they all have to be replaced, look out!
